Venki Ramakrishnan
speaker
313 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 25 Apr
Venki Ramakrishnan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, the goal of the aging research community is to give you a pill so you can have that blueberry pie and ice cream.
I personally think that our mortality is what gives our lives meaning. there's a famous law, Parkinson's law, that work expands to fill available time. Now imagine if you had all the time in the world, you would just procrastinate. And I think that's a serious problem. It gives us the drive to get things done. It gives us some purpose in life. Now, I also think there's another problem.
Let's say we all started living very, very long lives. And if you don't want a population growth, explosion, then what you have to have is very slow turnover. And this means the same people are hanging on with very slow change in society. And you would have, I think, a stagnant society. Because even though we're living longer, it does turn out that we're at our most creative when we're young.
This is true in many of the sciences, but oddly enough, it appears to be true even in areas like literature. Many authors write their best work when they're young. Then they go on to produce good work, but it's not necessarily their best work.
And Ishiguro, the writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, had an idea that he says, when you're young, it's not just about your cells and your DNA damage and things like that, but rather you're experiencing everything fresh for the first time. You're more objective. You're not biased. You haven't accumulated biases. And so that leads to creativity.
Another possibility is that as we get older, short-term memory is one of the things to go. And maybe the creative act requires holding disparate facts in your head in an attempt to synthesize some new thing. And if we're not able to hold them while we're trying to synthesize it, that makes creativity harder. So there are a number of explanations.
And I also think if you look at social change, things like that, it's often driven by the young. And there's a whole question of intergenerational fairness. If old people just hang on to power positions, et cetera, there's this problem of turnover. And we in academia are only too well aware of this. And so I think... For all sorts of reasons, it's problematic.
But of course, the flip side, as someone pushed back against me, was that, look, 150 years ago, we were living half as long as we do now on average. Of course, the oldest people were still living quite long, but on average. And now we're all living about twice as long on average. Do you think we should go back to the older time because there was more regeneration, faster regeneration?
Or would you want to go back? And of course, none of us would, right? And tomorrow, if somebody came to you with a pill and said, look, this is the result of anti-aging research. It's going to give you 10 extra years of healthy life. Nobody wants to live unhealthy, but say 10 extra years of healthy life. Most of us would take it. And that's the paradox.
We as individuals don't necessarily do what's best for we as a species or as a group. We haven't evolved that way. And this is the problem behind all sorts of social problems, including climate change. We're unwilling to do the things individually that we know might help us as a society.
Absolutely. I'll tell you one thing that I didn't say apart from the trio. There are other things that help with aging, and that is avoiding social isolation. It turns out reduces mortality. But having a sense of purpose also reduces mortality. That, to me, was a bit surprising. But in hindsight, perhaps not so surprising because it gives you that will to go out and do things.
So, you know, one of the purposes in your life is your podcast. And it definitely, you know, thinking about it, thinking about what new topics to discuss and whom to invite. You know, those are all things that are going to keep you young.
Thank you.
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